Albany Medical College, and obtained his degree in 1853. At once he was sent by Prof. James Hall, State Geologist, of New York, to visit the Bad Lands of White River, Dakota, to make collections of the cretaceous and tertiary fossils of that region. This was the beginning of his explorations of the West, which continued with little interruption for more than thirty years. The collections he made furnished the data for profitable scientific investigation; and the researches then begun mark the commencement of the geological investigation of the great West. The attention of the officers of the Smithsonian Institution was attracted to Dr. Hayden's labors, and in 1856 he was employed by Lieutenant G. K. Warren of the United States Topographical Engineers to make a report on the regions he had explored. He was appointed the same year geologist on the staff of Lieutenant Warren, who was then engaged in making a reconnoissance of the North-west. In 1859 he was appointed naturalist and surgeon to the expedition for the exploration of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. He continued in this service until 1862. The results of his work in his expeditions to the West were published by the scientific and philosophical societies of Philadelphia, and the earlier collections that he made he divided between the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and that of St. Louis.

Dr. Hayden was appointed acting assistant surgeon of volunteers in 1862, became full surgeon in 1863, and in 1864 he was sent to Winchester, Va., as chief medical officer of the army in the Shenandoah Valley. He resigned in 1865, when he was brevetted Lieutenant-Colonel for meritorious services during the war.

He was elected Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Pennsylvania in 1865, a position which he held until 1872, when increasing duties in connection with the geological survey of the territories induced him to resign. From 1867 to 1879 the history of Dr. Hayden is

the history of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, of which he was the geologist in charge and to the success of which he devoted all his energies during the twelve years of its existence. In this time more than fifty volumes together with numerous maps were issued under his supervision. One of the results of his surveys, and the one in which he took the greatest interest, was the setting aside by Congress of the Yellowstone National Park. The idea of reserving this region as a park or pleasure ground originated with Dr. Hayden, and the law setting it apart was prepared under his direction.

In 1879 Dr. Hayden became geologist on the newly organized United States Geological Survey. He continued these scientific labors until 1886, when he resigned on account of failing health after twenty-eight years of active service as naturalist, surgeon and geologist. To the general interest in science excited by the enthusiastic labors of Dr. Hayden in his geological explorations is due, in a great degree, the existence and continuance of the present United States Geological Survey.

Dr. Hayden was elected a member of this Society in October, 1873. In 1886 the degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by the University of Rochester and by the University of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of many other societies. throughout the country, and he was honorary and corresponding member of a large number of foreign societies. He was genial in character and sincere and enthusiastic in his desire to forward the cause of science, and a great part of his work for the government and science seems to have been a labor of love. Dr. Hayden died in Philadelphia, December 22, 1887, after an illness of more than a year.

For the Council,

STEPHEN SALISBURY.

EARLY BOOKS AND LIBRARIES.

BY STEPHEN SALISBURY.

CIVILIZATION has received no greater impetus than that given to it by the discoveries of the fifteenth century. Not only was the Western Hemisphere added to the known world, but the art of printing was invented, and in the latter part of the century was born the great leader of the Reformation, an agency most powerful in its influence upon human progress, whose initial movement was to a great degree occasioned by the invention of the printing press and the consequent revival of learning. Without that aid to the diffusion of knowledge and the impulse given to individual thought, it is not at all probable that the system of religious government which actually prevailed, or any which might have been instituted, would have been seriously menaced, still less powerfully interfered with and reformed. Although nothing new may appear in treating, somewhat at length, the gradual steps in the evolution of the printed book, from the early hieroglyphic sign scratched upon stone, bark or papyrus, still it may not be useless to repeat facts. known to all, but infrequently considered.

Man in different parts of the world has shown a remarkable coincidence in practical phases of development from savagery into civilization, when called to devise a means of intercommunication by written or spoken language or to organize for social purposes, for protection, or in most of the lines of intellectual growth. So that it is by no means. surprising when the investigator of to-day shows us that a new luxurious appliance is a crude approach to something. that was better understood in an Egyptian civilization of

two thousand years ago, or in some later community, the record of whose existence perhaps remains only in the crumbling ruins which cover the surface of the soil, and whose advancement in the arts is shown solely by the elaborate and curious articles found in the excavations made in its neighborhood.

Of the early history of India and China we as yet know comparatively little, but that little teaches us to believe that cotton weaving, sculpture and engraving were brought to much perfection in prehistoric times, and that in China the art of printing with movable types was practised long before it became known in Europe.

Until a short time before the historic era the art of writing was unknown in Europe, even in its rudest and most elementary forms. All moral and religious maxims, as well as traditional history, were preserved by a sacerdotal order, which transmitted them orally to their successors. By this means a great multitude of facts were handed down from generation to generation, by a body of men who became very capable in this direction. When writing was invented the labors of these memorizers did not suddenly cease, even when codes of religious and moral laws had been transcribed. The oldest of moral and religious codes known to us, the Sanskrit Vedas, was probably orally preserved and transmitted for generations, as we learn that twelve years of study was necessary for inferior Sanskrit priests and forty years for those of the higher grades. It is believed that the poems of Homer were thus handed down. for two or three centuries by professional bards and reciters of Greece, and the genuine portions of Ossian are known to have been preserved until a very recent period in the north of Scotland by oral tradition. It is possible that the arrangement of the sentence or theme into measured phrases having a balance of completeness, had its origin in an effort to aid the memory, and it is probable that the subsequent poetic metres of Greece and Rome were the result of such

efforts. Writing did not come at once into existence in its perfected state. It was the growth of centuries, like the culture of the memory. Egyptian writing, the parent of our own system, bears traces of the pictorial as well as of the phonetic principle. In Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, and in the Turkish and Chinese characters of to-day, we find a complicated series of pictures which have been changed and modified to secure convenience and despatch. It is said to be possible to follow the changes of form from the more correct pictorial representations through successive periods, until the letters assumed the present conventional character. At first, records that were kept were inscribed on the walls of palaces, temples, pyramids and obelisks. The vast number of these inscriptions and the want of space for more rendered some other form of preservation imperative. Records of victories and royal expeditions were carved upon rocks near the localities where they took place. The art of committing writing and inscriptions to small slabs of clay was discovered and practised in the Assyrian Empire, and notifications and proclamations were thus circulated. Lately we have seen samples of Babylonian books, which were secured by the late Catharine L. Wolfe expedition. They are little clay tablets inscribed on both sides in cuneiform characters and are commonly known as contract tablets, which contain the records of important social transactions, such as law suits, marriage settlements, etc., and they are now found stored in record chambers. Rock inscriptions were known to the Assyrians as speaking stones, and to the Greeks as hieroglyphics. The Egyptians discovered the use of papyrus, as a material upon which writings might be preserved, and cultivated the rush-like plant of which it is the fibre, to enable them to furnish the great quantity required for home use, and to supply the demand from neighboring countries. The Assyrians came near to the invention of printing, in the use of engraved seals from which any number of impressions might be taken.